Archive for August, 2009

A few months ago, we posted about Dinners for Life – the new healthy eating program for diabetics looking for easy to prepare meals that meet their special dietary requirements. Now, Dream Dinners is hitting the road with Dinners for Life and will be exhibiting today (8/6) thru Saturday at the American Association of Diabetes Educators 36th Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA.

It’s also worth noting from the AADE website:Dinners for Life, a division of Dream Dinners, Inc.

Company Description:

Dinners for Life dietitian-approved, portion-controlled dinners are healthy, taste great and designed to promote the management of diabetes. Dinner for life is a subsidiary of Dream Dinners, Inc., the originator and leader in the meal assembly industry.

In the fifth-season finale Sunday, Melissa d’Arabian came out on top in the popular TV series The Next Food Network Star,which set 10 cooks from across the nation in competitive challenges to see who might have what it takes to join Food Network’s cast of celebrities.

The win earned her the chance to host her own six-episode series on the Food Network. Her new show, Ten Dollar Dinners, which will air Sunday at 11:30 a.m., is a how-to guide for making dinners for four for under $10.

As part of the company’s 25th Anniversary “Papa’s Road Trip” tour, Papa John’s Founder John Schnatter will stop in Denver on Monday, and Los Angeles on Tuesday, on a nationwide search to find the 1972 Z28 Camaro he sold in 1984 to open his first Papa John’s restaurant.

Schnatter will be driving a replica of his beloved Z28 in the Mile High City and City of Angels, the latest stops on his multi-city tour. He’s offering a $250,000 finder’s fee to the person who locates his original Camaro, which had such distinguishing features as a custom-installed sunroof and Indiana license plate 10z 54. Additional clues about the car can be found online at www.papasroadtrip.com.

Looks like things have gotten stirred up in light of this new Julia Childs movie. And, it appears many are coming down on the side that cooking has become so easy and so convenient that no one does it anymore.

But here’s what I don’t get: How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen but so much less eager to brown them ourselves? For the rise of Julia Child as a figure of cultural consequence — along with Alice Waters and Mario Batali and Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse and whoever is crowned the next Food Network star — has, paradoxically, coincided with the rise of fast food, home-meal replacements and the decline and fall of everyday home cooking.

That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them to do so. Cooking is no longer obligatory, and for many people, women especially, that has been a blessing. But perhaps a mixed blessing, to judge by the culture’s continuing, if not deepening, fascination with the subject. It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.

Some interesting commentary on how we cook, or more to the point, on how we like to watch other people cook. Even though Julia and all the others are loved and their cookbooks still sell by the truckload, actually putting something in a pot or skillet is a lost art within most homes. Even though cooking show ratings are at an all time high, people are no more versed in the kitchen than they are with car maintenance. Is buying a cookbook, or watching a show on TV enough of an “action” for most people to feel they’re cooking for their families? And I agree, putting a frozen pizza in the oven is not cooking.

So much we’ve learned, but so little we put into practice. And it can’t all be because “we’re too busy”.

She was America’s original TV chef, whose 1960s show has inspired the modern-day likes of Martha Stewart, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay. Now Julia Child’s story is being told in a movie starring Meryl Streep and has ignited a fierce national debate as to why Americans love cooking on television but not in the kitchen.

Pollan, a leading advocate of organic cuisine and a critic of industrial food production, said that while Child may now be being immortalised on the silver screen, her lessons had been effectively unlearned by the modern American public. He complained that Americans have relegated cooking skills to their TV screens. “How is it that we are so eager to watch other people browning beef cubes on screen, but so much less eager to brown them ourselves?” he asked.